confabulation

plural confabulations

1. countableuncountableA casual conversation; a chat.

   […] Mrs Grantly was preparing herself for a grand attack which she was to make on her father, as agreed upon between herself and her husband during their curtain confabulation of that morning.

   1855 January 5, Anthony Trollope, The Warden, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC

   2 more examples

   The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order to “come in” as something new.

   1898, Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

   The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.

   1920, Edith Wharton, chapter XXXIV, in The Age of Innocence, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

   Synonyms: confab

2. countableuncountablehuman sciencesA fabricated memory believed to be true, especially in someone with dementia or with encephalopathy from advanced alcoholism.

   Segal said another characteristic of Trump’s questionable mental acuity is confabulation. “It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.”

   2025 August 3, Adam Gabbatt, quoting Harry Segal, “‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   1 more example

   For Örulv and Hydén, confabulation is ‘world-making’ (669). What the person with AD chooses to enunciate, ‘may capture something important in the way the person makes sense of his or her life and also make meaning-based connections’ (Hydén and Örulv 2009: 206).

   2021, Pramod K. Nayar, Alzheimer's Disease Memoirs: Poetics of the Forgetting Self, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 76

3. countableinformaluncountableAn assertion, statement, or text generated by a generative AI that is presented by that AI as if it were true but is in fact a made-up, false notion.

   Synonyms: hallucination